It is a difficult task to capture the history of biological psychiatry in a brief essay. Let me frame this modest effort in a timeless humanistic perspective. Psychiatry is the study and treatment of troubled mental lives. Its ultimate goal is to heal broken spirits. At its core, it is an attempt to better understand human thoughts and emotions and to allow this understanding to inform the heal...

PURPOSE Joseph Lister introduced antiseptic surgery in 1867. American surgeons, entrenched in the old ways of 19th century medicine, failed to adopt Lister's methods. MATERIALS AND METHODS Examples of the hubris and arrogant thinking displayed by early American surgeons are best shown by Thomas Eakins' masterpiece, The Gross Clinic, and by the death of President James Garfield. RESULTS Samu...

The article empirically examines the timing of initial decisions to adopt food safety systems and subsequent decisions to maintain the certification. Survival models are used to evaluate firm-level decisions among seafood processors in the Philippines. Whereas initial certification decisions were influenced mainly by easily obtainable a priori indicators such as output price, scale of productio...

What is a “mental illness”? What is an “illness”? What does the description and classification of “mental illnesses” actually involve, and is the description of “new” mental illnesses description of actually existing entities, or the creation of them? “solastalgia” is a neologism, invented by the Australian environmental philosopher glenn Albrecht, to give greater meaning and clarity to psychol...

The paper offers an account of integrity as the capacity to deliberate and reflect usefully in the light of context, knowledge, experience, and information (that of self and others) on complex and conflicting factors bearing on action or potential action. Such an account of integrity seeks to encompass the moral complexity and conflict of the professional environment, and the need for compromis...